Like a Thousand Suns
Why death is a fiction
'When the sun sets, Yājñavalkya, and the moon has set, and the fire has gone out and speech has stopped, what light does a person here have?' 'The Atman, indeed, is his light,' said Yājñavalkya. - Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 4.3
My grandmother turned 91 last week. Many of us in the immediate family got together for a leisurely lunch at a restaurant we like. All her children were with her around the table - her three sons (the eldest of them being my father) and her daughter; one of her great-granddaughters - my daughter - was with her too, and many who couldn’t be with us were sending in their wishes from other cities and countries via video. She must have been content.
She was a career professional (not very common among Brahmin women of her generation) - she still assiduously collects the pension she gets from her decades of service as a government-school teacher in Vellore. She is a strict and no-nonsense - my cousin and I call her ‘Military’ - yet practical and extremely supportive mother and grandmother. Contrary to stereotype, she gets along wonderfully with all her daughters-in-law. She is a reader with a wide range of interests, clocking two or three Tamil books a week, and she was - with my grandfather in their post-retirement years - an almost perennial traveler to temples across India.
She doesn’t hold back from sharing her opinion on things, but she is equally accepting of counter-opinions - direct communication, no grudges held. This trait in particular has brought her very close to my wife - they have a gamely go at each other at times, but that just seems to bring them closer together. She has been with me during every significant event of my life so far, and I find it hard to imagine her not being around for the many milestones ahead in my daughter’s life. But she knows - we all know - that the clock is ticking down.
Her body is crumbling; she has lost a lot of her flesh, her back has collapsed into a hunch, her nose and throat are giving up. She finds it hard to eat, she sometimes finds it hard to breathe. Severe pain racks her body at frequent intervals. And her eyes are starting to lose their shine. The old spark - and the self-deprecating humor - comes back from time to time, especially when she is sitting around with family chatting about old times, but there are long periods of dullness, anxiety, and pessimism. Someone who never complained about anything, who was fearless in every situation, is now starting to weaken. She will certainly fight on, but she might be losing some of her will to resist the depredations of old age.
When she chooses to fight no more, her body will drop off.
But will she ever leave us?
I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question. Let us examine this question carefully.
In an earlier essay (Everything Everywhere All At Once), we discussed how every object that you perceive in the world can be seen as Existence itself (‘substance’) plus the names-forms (‘attributes’) that seem to distinguish one object from another. The substance - the fundamental substratum - of all objects is the same - it is Existence itself. All we need to do, we discussed, is look beneath the layer of appearances (the layer of ‘names-forms’), and we will find Brahman right there. Brahman as Existence - sat - all around us, in everything, at all times.
If you are with me so far, let us go deeper.
Our conclusion in that earlier essay was a part-way stop and not the final destination. It was a conclusion that made concessions to our common sense view of reality. But let us not make compromises this time. I am going to take back some of the things I said in that essay. Particularly, let us examine that layer of names and forms - the ‘attributes’ - that seem to separate one object from another.
Pick up any object from around you. Mentally note its shape, weight, color. This is the ‘appearance layer’, the attributes of the object. Now ask yourself - do these attributes exist? Does the redness or the greenness or the roundness or the heaviness exist? If no, then there is nothing to talk about. If yes, then these attributes must also have Existence, right? In which case then the attribute ‘redness’ can be further broken down into <Existence + ‘redness-redness’>. Now take this ‘redness-redness’. Does this exist? Obviously, because we mentioned it as an entity in the above equation. In which case it can further be broken down into <Existence + ‘redness-redness-redness’>.
You see where this is going. The more you examine an object, you find it slipping between your fingers into pure Existence itself. The more you examine an attribute, you find it to be nothing but the substance itself. There are no attributes, there is only substance. Everything you investigate melts back into this substance, into pure Existence.
What about all these objects that I see then? If there are no attributes, how can I distinguish one object from another? Very simply, there are no separate objects. They seem to exist, they appear to us, but when we probe into their independent reality, they disappear into non-dual Reality itself. All around you is Existence and nothing but Existence.
All divisions and plurality, all apparent attributes, are like mirages in the desert - take a closer look and you find only the sand underneath.
At first glance this might seem similar to the direction physics is taking, where everything is being condensed into one material substance. Advaita Vedanta’s sat (Existence) could seem like the strings in Superstring theory - one fundamental entity whose vibrations are what appear to us as this multifarious world. But there is a fundamental difference. Science’s strings - (or ‘energy’, or any other candidate for the post) - are material, physical entities. They are part of the objective world. They are ultimately objects. Sat of Vedanta is not an object.
What then is sat?
Now is when we bring in yourself into the equation. Until now we were talking of Existence as something we find all around us, but let us look away from the world and turn the spotlight on ourselves. Let us examine who we are. Let us examine this ‘I’.
For this, let us briefly bring on to the stage Rene Descartes, considered the father of modern Western philosophy. The modern era (400 years before our time) was bringing in a skeptical tinge that was coloring everything with doubt, including the concept of God. Descartes was racked with doubt himself, but he sought desperately to set knowledge on a firm ground; he wanted to place God on an unshakeable foundation. The only way to do that, he realized, was to take a clinical and uncompromising attitude. The only way forward was to discard everything that could be doubted and see if anything remains.
He thus embarked on his famous project of Cartesian Doubt - take every piece of knowledge we have and ask of it - ‘Can this be doubted? Is there even a miniscule chance that this is untrue? Is it possible - even slightly - that a malicious demon is deceiving me about this knowledge? ’ If the answer is Yes, discard that knowledge and move on.
The pile of discarded knowledge rapidly became mountainous. It seemed like everything that we thought we knew can be doubted, and hence must be discarded.
Everything except one thing.
He must have been writing with a lit wax candle on his desk. Looking at the wax, he writes, ‘I who seem to possess so distinct an apprehension of the piece of wax, do I not know myself, both with greater truth and certitude, and also much more distinctly and clearly?’ In other words, the wax candle itself might not really exist, it might be a projection of that deceitful demon, but the ‘I’ who is looking at the candle undoubtably exists. Everything in the world can be unreal deceptions, even my own understanding of what I am can be incorrect, but the fact that there is an ‘I’ that is getting deceived cannot be doubted - it is the only thing that cannot be doubted.
I might not know who or what I really am, but I know with absolute certainty that I exist. Self-existence is the only direct knowledge that we have, the only thing that cannot be doubted. ‘I am’ is the firm foundation - the prerequisite - for all other (indirect) knowledge; it is the ground on which all proofs stand.
Why did we have to go to Descartes to explain this concept? Partly because I like Descartes’ way of approaching the question, but mainly because this was taken to be obviously true by Indian philosophers for millennia. One can doubt the existence of other things, but how can one question the existence of the very ‘I’ that is doubting? The Self needs to exist for one even to doubt the Self.
After establishing this certain ground for knowledge, Descartes made some gymnastic leaps to bring in the real existence of the World and a separate God that creates the World. Most Indian schools of philosophy, on the other hand, stayed with this concrete knowledge and explored its implications. If the Self is the only thing that we can know for sure, we Indians said, then let us drop everything else and go into a deeper examination of the Self itself; let us turn the telescope around and focus it inwards.
And what did they find? They found that the Self is nothing but Consciousness itself, the Light that shines on everything ‘else’. Hinduism - particularly Advaita Vedanta - provides systematic ways of conducting this examination, such as the Pancha-kosha-viveka method.
Does Consciousness here mean thoughts, emotions, feelings? No. Those are experiences. Every experience implies an experiencer. To paraphrase from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad - Who is the hearer of sound, Who is the seer of vision, Who is the knower of knowledge? There is an Awareness itself to which these experiences are appearing. This Awareness is the Self - the Subject.
Let us go further - what can we say about the nature of this Subject that is me? What are its attributes or properties? The response to this - from an Advaita Vedanta perspective - is that there are no attributes that this Subject possesses. Think about it - any attribute would be objective, something that is observed; anything that is observed implies the existence of the experiencing Subject. Thus any description that you add to the Subject will have to jump across to the ‘object’ side of the Subject-Object divide, leaving the Subject untouched. The ‘I’ is nirguna - completely devoid of properties. You are the Witness of everything, the pure Subject, Consciousness itself.
Can one ever experience - or ever know - this Subject? One cannot ‘know’ it, since it is not a separate object to be known; it is indeed the knower of all knowledge. But - and this is the crucial point - while one cannot know or experience it like we seem to know or experience other objects, this Subject IS us. How can we say this? Because it is implied as a prerequisite in every other knowledge; it is direct knowledge; Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.
You can never see your own face directly, you can only see the reflection of your face in the mirror. But does that mean you do not have a face?
Let us tie the threads together. You closely examined the ‘I’ and found it to be the light of pure Consciousness. Now consider all these other objects that you are witnessing - Do they have separate existence? Are these objects anything other than you the Subject?
Just as we picked up every object and melted it into Existence, Advaita Vedanta says that you can take every object and melt it into Consciousness. Pick object A. My experience of object A can be broken down into Consciousness (the experiencer) and some properties (‘A-ness’) that seem to separate object A from other objects. Now let us examine this ‘A-ness’; if I am talking about this as a tangible entity, it simply means this ‘A-ness’ is also an experience that presents itself to Consciousness. Which means it can further be broken down into Consciousness itself + ‘A-A-ness’… The more you examine A, the more A disappears into Consciousness itself.
Everything that you see is Consciousness through and through. Put your hand out and touch the wall in front of you - it is nothing but Consciousness - it is nothing but your own real Self.
We earlier spoke about Existence - sat - as the fundamental substance, as Reality. Starting from the indubitable existence of ourselves, we now find that Consciousness - chit - is the fundamental substance. Which brings us to the core Advaita Vedanta teaching - sat is chit. Existence is Consciousness.
Which means you are Existence. You are the substance underlying the world. In fact there is no separate world, there is only you, there is only the light of Consciousness that is manifesting as this limited self and the entire world. The world can be collapsed back into you. You are Brahman.
na tatra sūryo bhāti na candratārakaṃ nemā vidyuto bhānti kuto'yamagniḥ |
tameva bhāntamanubhāti sarvaṃ tasya bhāsā sarvamidaṃ vibhāti‘There the sun cannot illumine, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor this lightning, and what to speak of the fire in your house?
‘The Atman shines and these things shine after it. By Its light, the whole universe is lit up.
- Mundaka Upaniṣad 2.2.10
Two weeks back, my wife Charanya, my daughter Ira and I flew to Mumbai for a day, to just spend some time with my wife’s grandmother. She had to be admitted to the hospital earlier that week, and had just been brought back home. She is 89, and her body was starting to severely weaken too. The last time we went to Mumbai to meet her, just 6 months back, she would sit with us and talk for hours at a stretch - chuckling at jokes (her face lighting up as she laughs), sharing stories, admonishing us for being lax on following some of our rituals. On that last visit she explained many things to me about Sri Vaishnavism, the tradition Charanya belongs to. There is so much knowledge, so much lived wisdom, locked up inside our grandparents. They carry it around without a fuss, sharing only if we care to ask. She was in high spirits during that last visit. But this time around, she could not sit up and talk for more than 30 minutes at a stretch.
She took off the amulet she had on her wrist and handed it over to Charanya. She had not once - even for a second - taken that amulet off in fifty years. Charanya was teary eyed; that amulet will, from now, be her most cherished possession.
I have written about my maternal grandmother here. I wrote that essay 6 years back, when she turned 80. She still has the same striking intelligence, the same impish humor, the same stubbornness, the same quiet and calming presence. But her body is slowly crumbling. Her fingers are so misshapen now that she finds it hard to lift up even her cup of tea. Her bones are so fragile that a minor fall could be critical. She still solves all the problems from any mathematics book she can get her hands on, she still watches cricket (particularly the IPL, since Dhoni still plays there), but her hearing has deteriorated rapidly. Long conversations are harder to have.
If the Subject is nirguna, property-less, then can any change affect it? Can it grow old, can it die? Of course not. Any change is objective; the Subject is completely untouched by change.
The ‘I’, our real Self, sits outside of space, time, and causality. It is the witness of all growth, flourishing and decay. It is beyond the reach of death.
We are lucky to still have 3 of our grandmothers with us, and we should spend all the time we can with them. I know that they will fight on for some more years to come. There are many more festivals to be spent together, many more sessions of animated conversation, many more arguments to be had, many more scoldings to be received. But when the time comes and they choose to leave us, it is only their body that would have fallen. They - as Existence-Consciousness - will live on.
The degradations of their bodies might be pushing them a little distant from us, but the blinding light of Brahman is shining out from them undiminished, like a thousand suns.
I do not at all mean this metaphorically or in a poetic sense. I say this as a very direct statement of reality - They are immortal.
Extremely well explained.